Steve, Check out Grounded Cognition, by Barsalou. He makes the fascinating point that purely symbolic approaches to conceptualisation are actually, historically, an aberration . Origins of Grounded Cognition
Perhaps surprisingly, grounded cognition has been the dominant view of cognition for most of recorded history. Nearly all prescientific views of the human mind going to back to ancient philosophers (e.g., Epicurus 341– 270 B.C.E./1987) assumed that modal representations and imagery represent knowledge (Barsalou 1999, J. Prinz 2002), analogous to current simulation views. Even nativists, such as Kant (1787/1965) and Reid (1785/1969), frequently discussed modal images in knowledge (among other constructs). In the early twentieth century, behaviorists attacked late nineteenth-century studies of introspection, banishing imagery from much of psychology for not being sufficiently scientific, along with other cognitive constructs (Watson 1913). When cognitive constructs reemerged during the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, imagery was not among them, probably for two reasons. First, the new cognitivists rememberedWatson’s attacks on imagery and wanted to avoid the same criticisms. Second, they were enthralled with new forms of representation inspired by major developments in logic, linguistics, statistics, and computer science. As a result, theories of knowledge adopted a wide variety of amodal representations, including feature lists, semantic networks, and frames (Barsalou & Hale 1993). When early findings for mental imagery were reported in the 1960s (for reviews, see Paivio 1971, Shepard & Cooper 1982), the new cognitivists dismissed and discredited them (e.g., Pylyshyn 1973). Nevertheless, the behavioral and neural evidence for imagery eventually became so overwhelming that imagery is now accepted as a basic cognitive mechanism (Kosslyn et al. 2006). Most recently, research in grounded cognition has challenged theories that originated during the Cognitive Revolution on www.annualreviews.org • Grounded Cognition 619 Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008.59:617-645. Downloaded from arjournals.annualreviews.org by EMORY UNIVERSITY on 02/13/08. For personal use only. numerous grounds (e.g., Barsalou 1999, Glenberg 1997, Harnad 1990, Lakoff 1987, Searle 1980). First, little empirical evidence supports the presence of amodal symbols in cognition. Instead, amodal symbols were adopted largely because they provided elegant and powerful formalisms for representing knowledge, because they captured important intuitions about the symbolic character of cognition, and because they could be implemented in artificial intelligence. Second, traditional theories have been challenged on the grounds that they fail to explain how cognition interfaces with perception and action (the grounding problem). Third, traditional theories increasingly face a lack of understanding about where the brain stores amodal symbols and about how amodal symbols could be consistent with neural principles of computation Mike, Thanks for the reference, which I will study further. As many know, the Texai KB is currently crisp and symbolic, and will have to stay that way until after the bootstrap English dialog system is developed. I want Texai to be implemented in a cognitively plausible manner, and articles such as this one are very pertinent to my longer range plans for Texai, especially regarding the scoping and organization of agent knowledge. When the future Texai deals with a dog that it sees, visual representations of dogs must be close at hand. More comforting with regard to my current symbolic-only approach is this quote from the paper: Although skepticism that discrete amodal symbols underlie conceptual processing in the brain continues to increase, there is little doubt that the brain is a symbolic system. Unlike cameras and video recorders, the brain uses categorical knowledge to interpret regions of experience that contain agents, objects, actions, mental states, and so forth. The brain does not achieve its powerful forms of intelligence by processing holistic images. Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 ----- Original Message ---- From: Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Cc: dan michaels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, April 20, 2008 12:17:00 PM Subject: [agi] Concepts - Cog Sci/AI vs Cog Neurosci Current Directions in Psychological Science – April 2008 – In Press http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/cd/17_2_inpress/Barsalou_completed.pdf THE DOMINANT THEORY IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE Across diverse areas of psychology, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy, the dominant account of the conceptual system is the theory of semantic memory (e.g., Smith, 1978). According to this theory, the conceptual system is a modular memory store that contains amodal knowledge about categories. Semantic memory is viewed as modular because it is assumed to be separate from the brain’s episodic-memory system and also from the brain’s modal systems for perception, action, and affect. Because semantic memory lies outside modal systems, its representations are viewed as different from theirs, providing a higher, amodal level of representation. The transduction principle underlies the view that amodal representations develop for categories in a modular conceptual system THE DOMINANT THEORY IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE A very different view of the conceptual system has arisen in cognitive neuroscience. According to this view, categorical knowledge is grounded in the brain’s modal systems, rather than being represented amodally in a modular semantic memory (e.g., Martin, 2001). For example, knowledge about dogs is represented in visual representations of how dogs look, in auditory representations of how dogs sound, and in motor representations of how to interact with dogs. Because the representational systems that underlie perception, action, and affect are also used to represent categorical knowledge, the conceptual system is neither modular nor amodal. Instead, perception and conception share overlapping systems. Empirical evidence has been the driving force behind this view. agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ agi | Archives | Modify Your Subscription ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG. 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